DemLeft: How and when did you become interested in politics?

 

The first time that politics or at least public affairs grabbed my attention in a concentrated way was the spring and summer of 1968.  I was nine years old growing up in a liberal family in the  South Side Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park.  The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.(who had I heard speak with my parents at Soldier Field in July of 1966 )on April 4th was a watershed. The following day I stood at my dining room window as a massive procession of silent mourners passed beneath my family’s apartment at Fiftieth and Woodlawn. Thousands of black Chicagoans were walking in collective bereavement from all-black neighborhoods north of Forty Seventh Street to all-black sections south of Sixtieth Street. It was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop it seemed. Meanwhile, whole city blocks were in flames on the city’s black West Side. The West Side rebellion provoked the city’s racist white mayor Richard J. Daley to issue a “Shoot to Kill” order, telling his police to chief to target black “arsonists” for street executions. That sent a chill down the spine. I wanted to know what that was all about and started paying more attention to books and magazine articles on racial and other social inequalities, which helps explain why an old fourth-grade class picture my mother’s got shows me wearing a “Dump Daley” button. 

 

Later that summer we had the Democratic Convention in Chicago and I got interested in the antiwar movement and Vietnam. I was blown away by the live television pictures of Chicago police beating the crap out of protestors and anyone else they could swing at …all while crowds chanted “the whole world is watching.” I was glued to the tube, knowing that the scenes were just a few miles north.

 

The next summer my family took a big vacation that included a two-week stay in England.  It took place at the same time that the U.S. had its big moon landing. The next day all these English people would hear our American accents and say, “way to go, Yanks. You landed on the moon!” My father would tell them it was a waste of money; and cited all these terrible American poverty statistics. That stuck with me: what were “we” doing landing guys on the freaking moon when all these kids were damn near starving just a mile or two west and south and north of my family’s apartment in Chicago. I’d had more than a few run-ins with a lot of those poor kids and knew there were real faces attached to those numbers. 

 

 DemLeft: We notice that you possess a doctorate in History but are not currently working as an academic.  How have your educational and academic experiences both before and after college impacted your political ideals and activities? 

 

That’s an interesting and for me somewhat unpleasant question. It’s a mixed story.  I had an unbelievably good (and highly privileged, to be honest) grade-school experience at the original John Dewey Laboratory School (connected to the University of Chicago) during the Sixties and I think it kind of spoiled me for the later, more mediocre schools I attended (and didn’t attend). During the early 1970s, my folks moved to suburban Long Island and then (this was much better) to Ann Arbor, Michigan. I had some pretty awful public school teachers, which helped encourage me to become an apolitical and amoral delinquent who paid little attention to anything political or public.  But there were three exceptions to this indifference. First, I was riveted by the Watergate Hearings.  I had no idea how limited the scope of the Watergates hearings were and how much Nixon did that he wasn’t being busted for… infiltrating and terrorizing the antiwar movement and the left; bombing Cambodia and Laos and more. But I had this sense that Tricky Dick was a loathsome asshole and I got caught up in the televised drama of the hearings. You could watch this stuff in the afternoon, after school, like the World Series in the 1960s.

 

Second – and this might seem strange and not especially political – I remember at some point around the same time there was this big ice hockey series between an all-star team from the National Hockey League (NHL) and the Soviet Red Army team.  I’d been a big hockey freak growing up in Chicago during the Sixties and went into the series ready to root for all my NHL heroes (especially ones from my beloved Chicago Blackhawks).  Then something weird happened:  I remember being embarrassed by the contrast between the elegant teamwork of the Soviets and the violent thug-like behavior of the North American players.  I actually ended up rooting for the Soviet team. Somehow this fed into an early interest in socialism.  I even started to write a paper about radical thought in junior high school. I read some articles and then dropped it.   

 

My original high school in Ann Arbor was so bad that I made a strategic life decision not to attend classes. I remember showing up for final examinations in courses I’d never been to and just making random marks.  I did my final year in an alternative school called Community High and responded well to a non-regimented curriculum that  involved me doing a lot of independent reading and writing, focusing a lot on black novelists (Richard Wright and James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison).

 

But one good thing – this is the third big exception to the amoral indifference – happened at the first high school: I developed something of a crush on my 11th grade American Literature teacher and I really got into her final assignment for the course.  We were supposed to take our favorite novel from the class and write a new ending in which we tried to mimic the voice of our chosen author.  I had read (and hung on) every word of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and wrote a new final chapter (using the same title, “Why They Didn’t Hang Jim”) wherein the novel culminated in a slave insurrection that would have impressed abolitionist martyr John Brown.  I captured Twain’s dialogue perfectly (if I don’t say so myself) and the paper came back marked “A” and the words “Amazing! Paul You Are an Exceptionally Talented Writer.”  The teacher in question read the paper aloud to all five of her sections, identifying me as the author. Nobody could believe it since I was known to be legendarily disengaged from academic pursuits. I was embarrassed and secretly proud at the same time.

 

I realized that there was a big piece of the “radical Sixties” rattling around in my brain in the spring of 1975: I thought that Twain’s novel and much else should end with a great radical insurrection.  It’s like I’d been a latent revolutionary or something. The world was starting to look interesting again.

 

After high school my folks moved back to Chicago – the North Side this time – and I decided to go with them.  It was a good move.  I got away from a depressing, substance-abusing Ann Arbor crowd and found time to read.  I worked and quit various low-wage jobs in the city (busboy, bellhop, dishwasher), which introduced me to older working people and a new form of tyrant called the boss.  This motivated me to go to college, something that was far from my mind before.  By chance I ended up at Northern Illinois University and somehow gravitated – kind of like a moth to flame – into what at the time was the most Marxist history department in the country.  It was unbelievable – an overnight community. It was like a light bulb went on in a dark room and here it all was and everything seemed to make sense, including the last six years of “dazed and confused” alienation. It was a total immersion. One semester in and I was reading Marx and Trostky and Eric Hobsbawm and  E.P Thompson and Christopher Hill and Maurice Dobb and George Lefebvre and William Appleman Williams and C. Wright Mills and Herbert Gutman and Eugene Genovese and Gabriel Kolko and Herbert Marcuse and Rodney Hilton and Perry Anderson and EH Carr and Eric Foner and Jean Paul Sartre and Frederic Jameson and Arnold Kettle and Terry Eagleton and various radical journals like Monthly Review, Science and Society, Radical America, Studies on the Left, and New Left Review and hanging out with smart, funny left wing professors – some with Communist Party backgrounds – and graduate students who were reading all three volumes of Marx’s Capital and all the rest.  I practically woke up with a book under my arm every morning.  I loved it.

 

The thing about my undergraduate experience was that there was very little field or area specialization.  You could be interested in EVERYTHING including the present.  We thought we had this big cool Marxist paradigm that we thought explained basically EVERYTHING and seemed really hot with all the New Left academic work coming out.  I thought that capitalism and American imperialism were in their death throes and liked to hear that “half the world had already gone socialist” (as one of my professors liked to say).  I was also somewhat peripherally involved in political efforts over nuclear power (after Three mile Island) and about campus issues (we had a sit-in to keep the library open past midnight…there was a radical cause) and for the Citizens’ Party.  Stuff like that.

 

Then things started to narrow and “adult” responsibilities and the need to “make a living” took over. Nothing in graduate school ever came remotely close to the mind-liberating excitement and related sense of political engagement I recall from the undergraduate years. By the time Reagan became president, I was, pretty apolitical (and in retrospect amoral) again. The more guild/profession-centered professors had gotten their hooks into me and I was becoming academicized. My energies were focused on academic “career development.”  I still called myself a “Marxist” but increasingly this was just totally sucked into exhausting academic in regard to digging up aspects of past conflicts and struggles. I had to “pick a field” and I chose “American labor history.”  As the country seemed to have gone to the dangerous right, I retreated into the past and blind pursuit of the purported pleasures of academe. Reagan was busting PATCO with permanent replacement strikers but I didn’t care because I was basking in the excitement of the rise of the labor movement during the 1930s. 

 

I went to graduate school at the State University of New York at Binghamton and got all wrapped up in trying to be a “labor historian,” which ate up all my moral and intellectual energy.  I got married and became a father, both wonderful things that tended to work against political engagement. I do remember joining some fellow graduate students in protesting a Reagan speech in Johnson City, NY.  I turned to one of my comrades after Reagan’s limo went passed us and said “I think I just saw the Devil.”  He’d had the exact same ridiculous cognition. He’s had a very successful career as a labor historian. I have not, for both better and worse.

 

By the mid-1980s, I was out of graduate school and back in DeKalb, which was nicely located between my two main dissertation research sites (Madison, WI and Chicago). I’d taken and passed my comprehensive exams and needed to make some money. I was supposed to be writing a dissertation but there was no way: they’d given me $3,000 or something pathetic like that and I had a family to support. The money was a joke, with all dues respect. So I drove busses.  I worked as a “Sanitation Worker” at a Del Monte plant.  I was a canvasser for Illinois Citizen Action, which was the closest I got to being engaged in politics.   This was useful in making my “Marxism” a little less purely academic.

 

At Del Monte Plant 111 in the late 1980s, I used to try to get my fellow proletarians to jo

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